You should see some of the devastating threads where people have been told to look for something. Here is an incredible example:

http://forum.marriagebuilders.com/ubbt/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=2365838

http://richwith.com/mb/Previous%20Programs/05%20MAY/MB_052810.mp3 (start at about 24.5 minutes in)

I would not tolerate a marriage where I wasn't permitted to verify my wife's activities and prove to myself that she was trustworthy. I wouldn't tolerate it any more than I would tolerate my wife openly carrying on. Life is just too short.

"Trust, but verify" is actually a Ronald Reagan quote.

Smart man, that Ronnie.

SH told us the same thing about transparency, saying, "So what? If you've got nothing to hide, who cares who is looking, right?" And went further to put the onus on the spouse who wants to be trusted..."Be proactive," he said, "Install a GPS on your own and show your spouse how to monitor it. Hand over your passwords without being asked for them."

Yeah. Trust is fine, but verification is golden.

What do you mean by "use against the other person"? Marriage is not a two-sided issue. My wife and I are on the same side.

Both of us need good information to use as we work together on our marriage. If one of us starts preventing the other from getting that information, somehow, it puts the other in a quandry. But the fault there is the fault of the one obscuring information, not the fault of the one who does what he or she needs to find out what is going on.

If I found out my wife was unfaithful, I wouldn't care how I found it out, and I wouldn't let it stop me from doing what I felt I needed to do.

Anything else about my wife isn't used "against" her. It's used to help me become an expert in meeting her emotional needs, or to help me avoid becoming the cause of her unhappiness. Or else it's used to show me the path to follow as I try to help her become an expert in meeting my emotional needs and avoiding being the cause of my unhappiness (because when I phrase those requests, I need to know a lot about her to do so in a way that avoids me causing her unhappiness). None of that is "against" her.

I think Steve did credit Reagan in the session where he gave the phrase to us.

That kind of thinking does make some sense to me, but the vision of marriage you present on the whole doesn't look as happy as the one Dr. Harley presents.

You know, I actually LOVE it when my wife finds something in my email that bothers her and she tells me. Sometimes there's an unpleasant issue to face, but the end result when we are done is that we are more on the same page than we were before.

I found out awhile back that it was bothering my wife terribly when my parents emailed me things that were critical about her. As a result, I was able to take some steps to correct the situation, and she is now much happier. I am so glad that she felt free to look through my email, and felt the courage to tell me how she felt.

I'm going to bet that you are even now snooping on your wife, then. If not now, that you have in the past.

How does that mesh for you with the Love Bank concept and the realization that almost everything you do has the potential to affect your wife, positively or negatively?

Tom, I'm going to draw on something Mark1952 often says here: day to day living is so full of withdrawals from the Love Bank that you have got to be really, really vigilant to make sure we eliminate the withdrawals we can and make massive deposits.

To have a good marriage, we can't say "I'm not perfect" as an excuse for not changing. We change in order to be better, for our spouse. I'm thrilled with the work I've been able to do this year to tighten up my performance as a husband. And I've barely started.

Stop me if I'm wrong - you don't like intimacy, it makes you uncomfortable. But you don't want to be alone. So you find someone, someone you don't love but care about, enough to want them to be happy. But since you don't love them, you figure no one else will - since your opinions are more right than anyone else's for the most part. You do this because then you figure this puts you WAY ahead in the running tally that is a relationship in your eyes. You are automatically more noble, more sacrificing, more better because look at you, you're with someone you don't love! You're so giving and caring!

Ok I will stop you there Vib- I don't agree with that. I am not completely against intimacy, it is not my favorite thing, but I am ok with it at times. My goal was not to find someone I didn't love. I also did not figure nobody else would love her, she is a great person. No, I did not do it with the intent of gaining points as you say. I may agree with some of the things you have mentioned about my marriage, this is easily not one of them.

occasionally, I don't think the amount really matters. It is not always, but sometimes.

No I did not turn it around to try and make her feel bad about it. I don't know how you read it that way. She found something, she got upset, we had to discuss it out, and I had to fix the damage.
The second part of what you said about hiding it, yes I will admit to that.

I did not punish her for fiding out, I want to make that clear.

There is no girlfriend at work, friend yes, girlfriend no, friend yes. We have been over this. I thought that part was settled. I will admit I do miss being around some friends I have at work, but not just missing that person that you continue to incorrectly reference. I am not in a funk BECAUSE of it either. I thought it was clear I was in a funk because of money. Which is not the easiest thing to improve the situation of, trying to, but not easy.

Install a GPS, not a chance in the world. People should not have to be tracked. Again, that is something that just sounds so wrong to me. Even if an affair were to ever occur, if I couldn't trust the other person enough to not have a gps system on them, then the marriage would not be worth it. Just seems wrong to me.

I don't recall ever having any need/reason to snoop on my wife.

Not really sure what you meant by this one Markos? I would say that many things I do have an affect on my wife yes. If you want to go as far as say that everything I do/don't do, all of it, has an affect, yah to one extent or another. You can claim the butterfly affect in almost all situations in life, not just marriage.

I would like to add on a somewhat positive note, we had a somewhat open and honest discussion today in regards to a few different topics. It was good to get a few things out in the air.
The one negative was that she told me that my feelings I said I was having were wrong. I really am not sure where her comment came from. I was honest while we were talking and she basically said that couldn't be it.

So some O/H conversation, that ended up being strange.

Wow! I had not read that thead. Wow!

Just wanted to chime in....another one that was strongly encouraged to snoop and I found an affair within 24 hours of installing a keylogger. I only did it to apppease this board. I really didn't think my now XH was so stupid he would do that.

I'm curious what situations have made you snoop on other people in the past, then.

I take it your belief in the value of privacy in marriage is so strong a value that it overrides your natural tendency to snoop?